Memoto camera to record life with two pictures every minute, shared through Android app

It looks like the next big thing has hit Kickstarter, and it's called Memoto. This tiny little 5 megapixel camera clips to your clothes, automatically takes pictures, geotags them, and once plugged into your computer over microUSB, uploads to the cloud for storage (provided you have a subscription plan with Memoto). There isn't a single button on the camera because it automatically starts shooting as soon as you start wearing it.

The picture quality isn't particularly great, but Memoto is aiming for sheer volume. We're talking two per minute for two days straight on a single charge. Luckily, the Android and web app will help organize everything into batches of shots and splice the moments into time-lapse videos. Sharing can be open or private, with selective visibility.

On the one hand, I can't help but see this as the perfect Christmas present for hipsters that overshare on Instagram, but on the other I appreciate something taking pictures that aren't forced or framed, since I find they tend to be the most meaningful and honest. It's also nice having all of the pictures automatically organized by location and timeframe. Manually managing that stuff is a hassle, and my case often results in great shots sitting on an SD card somewhere, unshared and barely viewed. It would be good to see Memoto talk directly with your mobile in some way, as opposed to just accessing pictures already in the cloud, though transferring an image over Bluetooth every two minutes to be particularly battery-efficient. Maybe using the phone's GPS could add location accuracy, or maybe you could splice in photos from your phone into moments being recorded on the Memoto.

The Memoto Kickstarter campaign launched yesterday and is already fully funded. Early Bird backers stock is sold out, but there are some Memoto units available at the $249 tier, which is still $30 off what they intend to sell it for once it hits retail in the spring. Anyone biting? The pricetag seems a little steep, no?

Agreed, nearly $300 is way, WAY too expensive for a relatively low-res camera of dubious utility.

First, 2 frames per minute is far too slow to capture anything remotely smooth, so images will appear as more a random sequence than a true time lapse. I've taken time lapse while hiking at a frame every 5 seconds, and even that was unwatchable as a contiguous movie.

Second, the majority of people's lives are actually pretty boring. Just think how much of each day you sit at school or work doing some uninteresting task.

So, it doesn't have the resolution (in FPS) to capture interesting activities well, and what it will capture if worn on a daily basis will be largely mind numbingly boring.

I'm sure it'll sell to the narcissistic social media types who think the minutia of their daily lives are somehow of interest to others, but otherwise, I can't see this gaining any real success.

In regards to doing a time lapse while walking/hiking, it works much better to take one picture for each step you take. At a normal pace that's about 1 FPS for each step. Vimeo doesn't do this video justice because of the compression, but here is one I made using my regular camera with a chest strap, and remote shutter so as not to disturb the orientation: https://vimeo.com/2950851

Also, as you can see it works best when you have stable light source (cloudy skies work better than sunny). Since mine was done on a trail that has me face away and towards the sun I had some mixed results in that regard because I used a fixed focus, shutter speed , and aperture.

Cool video, and yea, I wish I chose a faster frame rate. I had hiked the Franconia ridge in New Hampshire, which was about an hour and a half, above the treeline, with spectacular views on either side of the ridge. Oh well, I'll just have to hike it again!

With the wifi back (or the new Hero 3 with built-in wifi), you can access the SD card wirelessly. The current smartphone app doesn't have this feature, but you can point a web browser to the IP address of the wifi back and access the stored images manually. It actually runs the Cherokee web server and provides a simple HTML interface to the SD card's file system!! It's pretty cool.

You might want to check the field of view before you run out any buy one (or several) of these. It's a nice idea, but mounted inside a fridge or pantry, you almost assuredly won't have full view of the inside. You might see 1 shelf, but probably not more.

I even strapped it to my daughters stroller and recorded one of our walks that way the other night. (Didn't come out well enough to share though due to my quick and dirty mount repeatedly failing.)

Which got me thinking it would be fun to make a mount to strap it to my head or chest and record some bike rides, runs and other activities. And that led me to thinking how nice it would be to have a small dedicated camera like this.

But their price point is WAY off. I spent $60 on a camera that does a heck of a lot and isn't that much bigger. Put an eyefi card in it and it would still be in the $100 range and could automatically upload photos like this. Just no geotagging and no custom app.

So I love the idea...but their price point just seems way too greedy for what it is.

Anyone else see exactly the same thing being talked about in an episode of NCIS a few weeks ago? When I saw the episode, I immediately thought, "I bet I will see this on KickStarter in no time." They say 4 months, but I wonder how long this has actually been in the works...

Hi, this is Niclas from Memoto. Thanks for writing about our company! We're looking forward to shipping an awesome product to the market and we appreciate your support! If you (this blog or its readers) have any questions - please don't hesitate to reach out through twitter, facebook, web, kickstarter, etc!

I notice there's a good spread of opinions here - we're glad that the Memoto camera can ignite good conversations! We're taking suggestions and ideas into consideration as we keep developing our product - we've already done many tweaks and implementations of (would-be-)user suggested ideas.

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